Wednesday, July 29, 2015

I got an email from the GVPL the other day to tell me the Japanese
Design book I’d requested was available for pick-up. Unlike some of the history
books on the reading list for our November trip to Japan, this book has lots of
pictures, so it’s easy to remember some of the stuff I’m reading. For example,
did you know the Japanese have at least twelve words for ‘elegant’? One of these
words (suki: informal, subtle elegance) could be said to describe the clean energy haiku I hope to program a computer to write.

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

This was supposed to look like it belonged in a set with the Banff Sunset I painted a couple of weeks ago. As it happens, about all they have in common is a lot
more detail than can normally be seen after sunset, when the only natural light
is alpenglow.

There are a couple of reasons they’re so different. I didn’t have the
other painting available for reference when I painted this one and, more
importantly, I couldn’t find my indigo paint, so I used Payne’s gray instead. I haven’t used my Payne’s gray for so long it
took almost five minutes to get the lid off the tube... And I think I like it
better!

Wednesday, July 15, 2015

After motoring around town (sometimes along streets with instantly melting and reappearing snow cover, apparently not photographed entirely in one day) I
selected this view including the New Mexico Museum of Art. The Museum, just one of four state-supported museums in Santa Fe, is in
the next block on the left side of the street. I think it’s one of the most
attractive examples of the iconic Pueblo Revival style of architecture,
featuring rounded
corners, irregular parapets, thick battered walls and projecting wooden
roof beams, which is very popular in Santa Fe.If you click on this link to Google Streetview, thenclick a
couple of times on the arrow that appears on the street, you can travel to the
next block, then pan the camera left to see the front of the museum.

Wednesday, July 8, 2015

I’ve excerpted and combined information and ideas
from old projects that I haven’t looked at for a while and made some of them part
of a new project – recycling a lot of paper and freeing up almost a gigabyte of
computer space in the process!

Painting our
Christmas trip to La Vegas is the only travel journaling I’ve done so far this year, but I have big plans for painting during and
following an Art Gallery trip to Japan I’ll be doing this November... and I’ve done my usual 'virtual travel journaling' by participated in six Virtual Paintouts this year, Philadelphia,
Bangladesh,
Greenland,
Bhutan,
Cesky Krumlov, and Estonia.

About Me

Charlene Brown is a Canadian painter who started writing about painting trips during the ten years she and her husband lived in Dubai. The Gulf Weekly began publishing her accounts of painting trips in that part of the Arabian peninsula -- then said they might consider other countries, even such exotic locations as Canada! She had written about painting trips in over twenty countries by the time her husband retired and they returned to Canada to live.